Reclaiming Lesbian Pride

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by Heart

...

I was telling Cheryl about an experiecne I had where a particular transwoman in a queer space was stalking me in an inappropriate way. While it occured to me that she was engaging in what I thought of as "male-ish" behavior (my frame of reference), the bottom line was that she was a jerk and had no boundaries. It was individual.

Yet, it did concern me in terms of the space we occupied together which was "women and trans space," and that it didn't feel "safe" in a very particular, gut kind of way -- a way which is NOT only individually about me and this person, but about history and reality. That is the part that gets avoided, I think, in the intense focus and care given to inclusive spaces. What are the values we share about participation in inclusive queer communities? How do we tie that to the actual history of sexism, classism, and racism, and the impact that has had on groups of people? Queer inclusivity cannot exist in a vacuum, as if we started with a clean slate and are creating a brave new world from scratch. Because we're not, we can't. We are carrying everything with us, every bruden, oppression, and division that racism, sexism, and classism ever created. Whether we want to or not.

Heart

Yes, some of my very ambivalent experiences with trans people have been damaging. The individuals were acting as individuals. No one should expect each member of a minority to represent that minority in all their actions. That said, all transwomen have spent at least part of their lives being socialised as male. Aj has written about this eloquently in another thread, but I don't have the patience to find it. She spoke about many small ways in which she was privileged over her sister while growing up because she was a boy. She acknowledges the obvious, which is that she benefitted from this, and probably continues to benefit a bit from that early boost, whether or not she wanted to be a boy. (Apologies for the paraphrase.)

As I wrote previously, my experiences with transwomen who have been socialised as male, who, unlike Aj and my friend A who I mentioned previously, have never questioned their history of privilege, who continue to use male-centric power dynamics they've learned over their lifetimes to gain advantages in personal and business matters, who have always lived by a 'power-over' model rather than a feminist universal empowerment model, are very VERY visible when they enter women's space. Those are the transwomen that make my friend A cringe, and that cause her to fear that she will be judged based on others' bad behaviours.

Denying the reality that some transwomen who haven't questioned their conditioning and socialised behaviours can make other women uncomfortable in what's supposed to be women's space, is painful and erasing for women like myself who rely on women's space for it's relative safety. When I'm told that I must not say the above because it's allegedly transphobic, I hear that my sense of safety is secondary to the safety of people who are acting 'like men'. Their oppression as transpeople is more important than my oppression as a woman, etc.

In real terms that means that when I'm at a women's sex/play party and a crossdressing man exposes his naked dick tied up in a bow, women who know he doesn't belong there don't feel empowered to challenge his invasive presence. That man with all the sensitivity of a tree stump felt emboldened to circumvent my playmates' efforts to shield me from a sight they KNEW I didn't want to see. More than a year later I still think about my anger and feelings of being invaded instead of the lovely scene I was having before Mr. Dick-in-a-bow stuck it in my face. He claimed to be trans. His safety was more important than mine.

...it didn't feel "safe" in a very particular, gut kind of way -- a way which is NOT only individually about me and this person, but about history and reality. That is the part that gets avoided, I think, in the intense focus and care given to inclusive spaces...

We lesbians have the most to lose when we lose women's space. Because issues of trans inclusion have proved difficult, the trend is to dismantle women's space altogether in favor of queer space. Eliminating the language means eliminating the problem, right? Not on my watch.